Merkel Says She Never Hid Communist Past as Book Questions Role

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said
she “never concealed anything” about her Communist
affiliations in former East Germany as a book suggested she
hadn’t been forthright.

The book by two German journalists cites an allegation that
Merkel, who is running for a third term in Sept. 22 elections,
had an “agitation and propaganda” role in a Communist Party
youth organization. She has said she was responsible for
cultural affairs and can’t recall doing party propaganda.

“I can only rely on memory,” Merkel, 58, said in Berlin
late yesterday after a gala screening of an East German movie
from 1973. “Maybe there are other things that I haven’t talked
about because nobody asked me about them.”

Merkel’s role in East Germany’s Free German Youth has been
a topic in previous books and interviews, reflecting lingering
questions about Germany’s first woman chancellor and the first
from the formerly communist east. “I have never concealed
anything,” she said on stage after yesterday’s screening,
responding to a German reporter’s question.

When the host, German film director Andreas Dresen, tried
to cut off the question, Merkel said, “Let him ask the
question. Otherwise, they’ll say we’re suppressing this. I can
handle it.”

She suggested that her membership in the Free German Youth,
something she has talked about openly for years, “looks
different” to western Germans than to someone like her who grew
up under a Communist dictatorship.

“I also was a member of the FDGB” -- the East German
labor union federation -- “and in the German-Soviet Friendship
Society,” Merkel said. Yet, “you really have to put that into
its context.”

The book by Ralf Georg Reuth and Guenter Lachmann cites
Gunter Walther, who worked with Merkel at an East German physics
institute in Berlin before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, as
saying she was “secretary for agitation and propaganda” at the
institute’s Free German Youth cell, according to a preview in
the Bild newspaper today.